Some among the distinguished array of American novelists tury after World War I now seem rather far removed from us. The writers who developed themes that were highly personal to their own experience stand apart. Ernest Hemingway, though he exercised enormous influence on the taste, and even the thinking, of the young in his time, has become an aloof presence only the more withdrawn from us because his gifts were so original and striking. His obsession was with crises of courage dramatized, in his best novels, against a background of foreign wars. He seems to be less a product of...